Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today about the provincial nominee program, and more specifically about how the program has developed in recent years. Immigration is a shared responsibility and provincial and territorial governments are prima

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Provinces and territories are responsible for the design, management, and evaluation of their own provincial nominee programs. That said, provincial nominee programs have to respect federal immigration law and regulations.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The same principle applies to all provinces. The province has responsibility for the design, management, and evaluation of their own provincial nominee programs. The bilateral agreements are not identical, but they're very similar with regard to that principle.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Oh yes.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In effect, I guess that's the reason for provincial nominee programs, since they're designed to enable provinces to work on specific local needs, whether they be demographic or labour market oriented. There's a wide variety of different programs; there are about 50. For example

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Basically, in general terms, the provinces' nomination authorities are a substitute for the selection processes that the immigration act and regulations lay out in categories like skilled workers, or the Canadian experience class, or our business programs. They are an alternative

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's probably best not to express my opinion but to outline the policy of the federal government in that regard.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  At the current time, and over recent years, the levels of the planning ranges have remained constant, although at a very high level, as you know—at historically high levels. Should the provincial nominee program continue to increase in size within a stable overall levels framewo

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, the pattern over recent years has been for the provincial nominee programs to increase dramatically as a share of the overall economic program component. At this time, the federal government has felt that it is important to maintain the space for the federal skilled worker p

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I don't think it would be good for me to speculate about improvements, other than to say that the processes, which the minister has put in place through ministerial instructions to enable us to manage our inventories and backlogs, have started us down a road where we can see that

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Mr. Davies. You'll understand that I can't talk about the details of the evaluation report prior to its publication, which is coming very soon, early next year. The department has been consulting closely with the provinces through the process of doing that evaluation

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We're certainly working toward that with them. I don't think that either us or the provinces would say that we are where we need to be. Certainly, the issue of fraud and program integrity across all immigration categories require strong collaboration between the levels of governm

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Of course, there is no one measure of mobility. You can look at where the provincial nominee candidates are a year after they arrive, or three years after they arrive, or further down the road. In a mobile economy, I don't think we would particularly.... We would be less interest

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's one of the key questions going forward as the provincial nominee programs grow in size. Only four to five years ago they were really quite small, and issues of overlap or redundancy or gaps were less important than they're starting to appear now. We are engaged in a mult

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We will check with the department as to when it will be available—